“The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend a personal God and avoid dogmas and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual, as a meaningful unity. If there’s any religion that would cope with scientific needs it will be Buddhism.”

• Albert Einstein, 1954,from Albert Einstein: The Human Side, edited by Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, Princeton University Press

Letter to Eric Gutkind (partial) Albert Einstein (1954) Translated from the German by Joan Stambaugh … … The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. These subtilised interpretations are highly manifold according to their nature and have almost nothing to do with the original text. For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything ‘chosen’ about them.

In general I find it painful that you claim a privileged position and try to defend it by two walls of pride, an external one as a man and an internal one as a Jew. As a man you claim, so to speak, a dispensation from causality otherwise accepted, as a Jew the priviliege of monotheism. But a limited causality is no longer a causality at all, as our wonderful Spinoza recognized with all incision, probably as the first one. And the animistic interpretations of the religions of nature are in principle not annulled by monopolisation. With such walls we can only attain a certain self-deception, but our moral efforts are not furthered by them. On the contrary.

Now that I have quite openly stated our differences in intellectual convictions it is still clear to me that we are quite close to each other in essential things, ie in our evalutations of human behaviour. What separates us are only intellectual ‘props’ and `rationalisation’ in Freud’s language. Therefore I think that we would understand each other quite well if we talked about concrete things.

With friendly thanks and best wishes

Yours, A. Einstein.

Unfortunately there does not appear to be a silver bullet yet. Which software you use depends on how important multiway video is.

I think the safest bet is for everyone to download a copy of ivisit, but you should probably try it out first before dishing out money. Otherwise if AOL IM supports multiway video then that’s a free solution.

This is the strangest but coolest animation I’ve ever seen: Right Brain v Left Brain.

AND I figured out the secret… there is no spoon.

Travel and Leisure magazine released poll results for America’s top 25 cities. Philadelphia apparently sucks, unless you are into the arts, monument-hopping, or getting mugged. Yeah!

If your MacBook won’t go to sleep when you close the lid, this seemed to work for me.

1. Trash /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.PowerManagement.plist (admin passwd required)
2. Trash ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.systemuiserver.plist

Try a restart and see if that works. If it doesn’t then move on to resetting the PMU

New from Science Daily:

“Across species from fish to mammals, they [researchers of this study] found that rates of protein evolution showed the same body size and temperature dependence as metabolic rate. Specifically, their mathematical model predicts that a 10-degree increase in temperature across species leads to about a 300 percent increase in the evolutionary rate of proteins, while a tenfold decrease in body size leads to about a 200 percent increase in evolutionary rates.”

From these results the authors conclude that “rates of protein evolution are largely controlled by mutation rates, which in turn are strongly influenced by individual metabolic rate.” It is well known that many physiological characteristics and population density correlate with metabolic rate (e.g. body size and relative metabolic rate). Now I suppose we can add this correlation to the list.

It appears the authors have observed something intuitive and subtly ground-shaking: the operation of an organism’s metabolism can influence the rate of introduction of mutations into that individual. This suggests that the dynamics of cellular metabolism, which are encoded in the genome and altered through evolutionary history, can in some way set the rate of change of the genome itself1. By no means does this suggest or implicate behavior in controlling such introduction, rather the idea that through history, genomes have been able to take a more active role in buffering against probably deleterious changes to itself, via the construct of a metabolism encoded by the genome.

Unfortunately the authors decided to focus on the significance of spontaneous mutation in being the driving force of protein evolution, rather than the ability of the organism (with its genome altered through its species’ historical interactions with the environment) to influence this mutation rate.

I can attest to this after trying to recover a broken Vaio using the manually burnt restore CDs (all seven of them), and then seeing a new Thinkpad ship without any system CDs… This is just no way to handle customer service. Beyond Microsoft’s being so anal about password protecting their “Genuine Software”, thus preventing you from legally just borrowing the CD from someone else, PC makers make you jump through hoops even to obtain your own legal copy of Windows.

Prof. Michael Ghedotti has posted a page on the Jesuit stance on accepting/teaching evolutionary biology, in addition to very briefly summarizing the stances for a variety of the world’s faiths. Interesting skim…

While a few previous notes outlined the benefits of various third party applications and add-ons, I have actually become frustrated by WindowShade for its bugs in the minimize in place feature, and the lack of updates for finderpop.

Dr. Bonner aptly subtitles this book “An Essay on the Structure of Biology”. Indeed he attempts to outline the architecture of biological organisms by focusing on generalizing principles. Although first published in 1965, I found the content remains remarkably modern, and provides a constant harping for the experimentalist on the important problems in biology.

“Size and Cycle” predates modern literature on the topic of evolutionary developmental biology by a long shot, although is predated by several important works, notably from C.H. Waddington and De Beer. Nevertheless, this book provides a superb theoretical perspective on the relation between evolution and development, by relating the concepts of the life cycle, a sequence of steps of a developing organism; size, which allows a more powerful classifiction of these steps, compared to using the adult form alone; and evolution, the force which enables change within and between the steps.

Newsweek article on the debate over religion

The article is reasonable enough, although hardly does more than rehash the same debate, except in an appeasing, positive light.

Newsweek article on the debate over religion

The article is reasonable enough, although hardly does more than rehash the same debate, except in an appeasing, positive light.

Original story from CNN

1. AleSmith Brewing Co. San Diego, CA USA
2. Three Floyds Brewing Co. Munster, IN USA
3. Stone Brewing Co. San Diego, CA USA
4. Westvleteren Abdij St. Sixtus Westvleteren Belgium
5. Hair of the Dog Brewing Co. Portland, OR USA
6. De Dolle Brouwers Diksmuide Belgium
7. Kalamazoo Brewing Co. Kalamazoo, MI USA
8. Pizza Port (Solana Beach) Solana Beach, CA USA
9. Dogfish Head Brewery Milton, DE USA
10. Fuller, Smith & Turner London UK
    >> more

Saw this article about Jef Raskin’s son’s ongoing attempts to implement his father’s ideas, over at : http://macenstein.com/default/archives/509

Apple’s Dock is a great all-purpose tool for basic and intermediate users, but it surely falls short when working with many open applications, minimized windows, or folders. If you ever run into these situations you will quickly find yourself a mini Dock with small, hard-to-read targets.

I have written about decoupling window minimization from the Dock before, but as Unsanity has not perfected their C-level performance on WindowShade, I will be using the Apple Dock for minimizations.

My Dock’s primary limitation is folder access. I want to access too many folders either from other applications or in general not while I have an open Finder window. Quicksilver permits fast key-based access to my filesystem, but sometimes, especially for drag-and-drop, mouse-based access is superior. Finder windows have that neat sidebar, but again, I don’t always have Finder windows sitting open, and don’t want to. In fact, I’d like to use Finder windows as little as possible; it reeks of individual files with description-less icons and their silly filenames. Even if I did settle for the sidebar, you can’t right click to delve into a folder.

In an effort to improve mouse-based folder access, I have revisited DragThing. Mouse-based UI is all about easy targets. As I have described previously2, the screen corners serve as the best targets. Since these are taken, we move on to the next best: screen edges. Now how can we put them to their best use?

[Enter DragThing…]

Current Desktop setup with Apple Dock and DragThing